Self-Organization of Mesoscopically-Ordered Parallel Rare-Eath Silicide Nanowire Arrays on Si(110)-16×2 Surface

Template-directed atomically precise self-organization of perfectly ordered parallel cerium silicide nanowire arrays on Si(110)-16 × 2 surfaces

“…Figure 2 shows a series of STM topographic images of CeSi x NWs self-organized on the Si(110) surface for different Ce coverages. At the initial growth stage (i.e., 1-ML Ce deposition) in Figure 2 a, besides the pristine upper and lower Si terraces with the zigzag chains of pentagon pair, we can obviously see that two straight and robust CeSi x NWs are formed on the upper Si terraces due to the preferential reactivity of Ce atoms with Si pentagon pair on the upper terraces, consistent with the formation of GdSi x /ErSi x NWs on the upper terraces of Si(110) [ 23 , 25 ]. However, this observation is in contrast to prior results that show the formation of NWs on the step edge of vicinal Si surfaces [ 34 ].…”

“…Our experiments were performed in an ultra-high vacuum, variable-temperature STM system (Omicron Nanotechnology GmbH, Taunusstein, Germany) with a base pressure of less than 3.0 × 10 -11 mbar. An n-type P-doped Si(110) surface with a resistivity of about 10 Ω cm was cleaned by well-established annealing procedures [ 25 , 29 , 30 ]. An atomically clean single-domain Si(110)-16 × 2 surface was confirmed by STM observation (Figure 1 ).…”

“…Recently, we have demonstrated that RE metals (e.g., Gd, Ce, and Er) can be self-organized to form a mesoscopically ordered parallel RES NW array on single-domain Si(110)-16 × 2 surfaces [ 23 - 25 ]. These parallel-aligned and unidirectional RES NWs exhibit identical sizes, periodic positions, large aspect ratios (length >1 μm, width ≤5 nm) exceeding 300, and ultra-high integration density up to 10 4 NWs/μm 2 .…”

Atomically precise self-organization of perfectly ordered gadolinium–silicide nanomeshes controlled by anisotropic electromigration-induced growth on Si(1 1 0)-16 × 2 surfaces

“…The dark, bright, and white terraces, due to the vertical height difference, form the (17 15 1) vicinal facet and often coexist in the 16 × 2 superstructure [30]. This long-range ordered 16 × 2 reconstruction of the singledomain Si(1 1 0) surface with a periodic grating-like superstructure has been used as an ideal nanotemplate for the 1D self-organized growth of well-regular parallel silicide NW arrays with good uniformity and identical size [19,20,[31][32][33].…”